


Natural Frequency

by szzzt



Series: Trusses [2]
Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (2012), The Avengers - Ambiguous Fandom
Genre: AI Feels, Action, Although maybe not in this particular story, Arc Reactor, Boundaries, Choking, Consent Issues, Disassociation, Extreme trust falls, Fun with verb tenses, Gen, Hurt Tony Stark, Hurt/Comfort, It'll all be okay in the end, Lesser of two evils, Mind Control, Non-Consensual Drug Use, Oh my god what's happened to Tony, PTSD, Panic Attacks, Power Dynamics, Restraints, Sorry Not Sorry, Team Dynamics, Tech Feels, Touch-Starved, Trust Issues, Whump, cardiac arrest - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-29
Updated: 2013-10-01
Packaged: 2017-12-16 12:52:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 18,832
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/862233
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/szzzt/pseuds/szzzt
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>[...] <em>When damping is small, the resonant frequency is approximately equal to the natural frequency of the system, which is a frequency of unforced vibrations. [...] When designing objects, engineers must ensure the mechanical resonance frequencies of the component parts do not match driving vibrational frequencies of motors or other oscillating parts, a phenomenon known as <span class="u">resonance disaster</span>.</em></p>
<p>  <em>-- Resonance. (2013, June 12). Wikipedia.</em></p>
<p>Steve must be able to read the horror on his face this time, because he leans in. "Tony, you're being controlled? If you can respond, blink twice."</p>
<p>Tony <em>tries,</em> he tries, but the best he can manage is a sort of flutter.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Phase

**Author's Note:**

> Many, many thanks to the inestimable [Kadigan](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Kadigan/pseuds/Kadigan) for beta-ing, encouragement, and cussing in the proper places! Also [MountainRose](http://archiveofourown.org/users/MountainRose/pseuds/MountainRose) for wonderful terrible things!
> 
> Ahahaha, I seem to be on a quest to accumulate as many warnings as possible. I mentioned that Service Core was first in a short series? They’re probably all going to have more warnings than the one before.
> 
> See the end notes for a more detailed description of possibly-triggering content.
> 
> It’s not necessary to read Service Core before reading this one.  
> But it might be fun.

It doesn’t go bad right away.

Hawkeye and the Hulk are waiting in the parking garage that Iron Man chases or maybe lures the giant killer robot into, how’s _that_ for strategy--the Mark VII can turn on a dime, on a fucking _dime_ , like momentum's not even a thing any more, and he laughs into the comm on the sheer exhilaration of it because he just played patty-cakes with this fucker all the way down 5th Ave with _zero_ civilian casualties despite the bot's clear preference for soft targets--and then, because he's gracious like that, he lets the bot get one good smack in for verisimilitude. It sends him spinning into a nicely distant family sedan.

The killerbot follows but hesitates on the downramp, cameras swiveling, so Tony peels himself out of glass and steel and fakes damage to the boot jets, trying to take off and flipping over instead. The bot flexes its crushers and gnashes its mandibles and comes for him in its terrifyingly fast sideways lope.

He waits til it’s almost on him, fully committed to its next stride, and fires the boot jets to scoot between two of its legs, striking sparks like a comet run aground. There goes the paint job, and _here_ comes the Hulk.

The bot sprouts two arrows before a big green uppercut smashes it into the concrete ceiling, and a third one as it falls back down. The Hulk is relentless, smashing it again before it can find its balance, and Tony has a hard time keeping a clear line-of-sight long enough to get a target lock. When he releases them, though, the little missiles do exactly what they were made to do and pierce through the armor on the bot’s joints, then _slag_ them cherry-red, fueling and extending their thermite reaction with the bot’s own alloy. The bot screams as two of its legs crumple and lashes out, catching Iron Man in the side and swatting him into the ground. Then Hawkeye completes his setup and all his arrows explode at once, blowing the bot’s chassis into two big pieces and a lot of smaller ones.

The leg Tony is pinned under flexes, digging into the concrete, then locks dead. The power sources in the other pieces are going dark one by one, so Tony lays his head back down and just...enjoys having nothing to do for a minute.

A shadow falls on him and Clint crouches down. “Hey,” Clint says, knocking on the helmet. “You awake in there? Need a hand?”

“What? No, I’m fine, it’s just...” Tony pops the faceplate and wishes, irritably, that he could run a hand through his hair. “This is what, number eight?” The serrations on the bot’s leg are streaked with dark red-brown, now smoking and charring, and yeah, he doesn’t want to be under here any more. He pulls out a laser to cut the weakened joint, which is still glowing hotter than anything outside of a foundry and only barely holding its shape. The leg itself isn’t glowing, but even so it’s too hot for anyone but Iron Man to touch.

He flubs the first cut, arm unsteady, and lines up to try again. He can’t keep the cut straight, he’s just making a mess. Is the angle that bad? He turns off the laser and brings his hand up to his face to check the lens port for damage.

The gauntlet whines, repulsor charging up. He _feels_ his fingers holding down the studs inside. He jerks in reflex, angling the blast up over his head; Clint jumps back and the armor’s faceplate snaps down automatically, triggered by the near miss.

Heart hammering, Tony grabs the bot’s leg and pushes. He wants out from under this thing _right now_. Both his hands spasm inside the gauntlets and the repulsors go to alternating fire, shifting him on pure recoil. Clint is yelling something into the comm and edging forward again when Tony slithers free and stands up shakily, taking one step, then another.

 _Tony isn’t doing that._ This isn’t a panic attack. Something is _walking_ him.

He takes a huge breath and it strangles in his throat, warning silenced. _“Sir,”_ JARVIS says, _“your readings--”_

His arm lifts, palm out, pointing at Clint. Oh god, not happening, not happening, not happening--he can’t hear anything but the charging whine--

The world skips a second and he’s in a crack pattern several meters up the wall, head ringing from some enormous noise. “JARVIS, cut power,” he gasps. The Hulk is really not happy with him. He can’t see Clint anywhere.

_“--backplate, cuirass linkages, left shoulder vernier--Sir, I strongly recommend--that command requires--”_

The jetboots engage and both his arms raise. He fires on the Hulk. This is officially the worst day ever. The Hulk roars in shock and anger and bats him back into the wall.

 _“Cutting all targeting and powered assist,”_ JARVIS says crisply. The armor falls like a rock.

He impacts feet first but has no chance of staying there; the suit’s weight and momentum buckle his knees and send him crashing down, though its failsafe systems spread and absorb the force and protect his joints from taking too much torque in any direction. It still feels like being hit by the third car in thirty seconds. He lies there, stunned and beginning to get that floaty disassociated feeling.

Something jostles him--the external feeds go green, then black, and the armor groans around him as the Hulk wraps a massive fist around his head and upper body and picks him up like a child with a doll. He panics for a second, head twisted awkwardly and pressure warnings popping up on the HUD, then goes limp again when he realizes the Hulk isn’t squeezing or smashing, just carrying.

The comm is going crazy but it might as well be white noise; he can’t follow any of it. He’s going into shock. He aimed at Clint, might have shot Clint--did shoot the Hulk--did someone hack the armor? Mind control?

He can fight in shock, up to a point; he’s done it before when blood loss was involved. He disassociates in battle all the time, little chunks of a few seconds here and there when he falls or sees a hit coming or knows someone's life is riding on his snap decision. He deals with it later. He's known how to do that since the first time he flew an ultralight.

This, his body not under his control, is new. There's no sense of intrusion in his mind, just--signals not getting through. Replaced by _different_ signals. It's a goddamn man-in-the-middle attack. A dozen experiments flit through his head, pointing to half a dozen possible countermeasures. Too bad he's muted right now, and has been since those words to JARVIS; he can’t even slow down his breathing.

Observations. He’s blinking and swallowing when he needs to, but he can’t do it on command. He thinks, very deliberately, about yawning. A few seconds later, he does yawn; he can’t help it. Okay, good data point, on a scale of one to full motor control this is about point-two-five, but at least he can deliberately influence _something_.

Big green fingers uncurl and the Hulk drops him as gently as one _can_ be dropped on an--an overturned SUV. They're back outside in the street. The Hulk leans very close, peering at him.

Tony’s arm rises, shoulder straining under the dead weight of the armor, and tries to fire again. _Click._ He tells it to lower. It doesn’t.

The Hulk rears back, face twisting. "TIN MAN BROKEN," he yells, punching the street with both hands, then shields his face and looks back at Tony, touching the armor's palm with one enormous fingertip. "SORRY," he whispers, and shuffles away, speeding up until he leaps twenty stories and vanishes around a corner, moving as fast as a Hulk can go.

It's going to be a pain locating Bruce after this.

Tony would be happy to just make friends with this SUV, but his arms and legs have other ideas and they start pushing, grabbing parts of the suspension, trying to lever the armor upright. He takes an inordinate amount of satisfaction in the fact that the Mark VII is heavy. Not as heavy as VI, but still, without power assist and feedforward he can just barely walk it along from a standing start. He's never tried to-- _ow_ , ribs--sit up in it unassisted.

For all it's coming in handy now, it's a pretty big oversight. He really ought to add a full set of unpowered movement tests to future suits. Or, wait, add powered sit-up stand-up sequences to safe boot mode. Oh, that could work.

After flailing for a bit his traitorous body ends up just sliding down the SUV, pushing off it to get mostly vertical, and the bruises on his upper back strenuously object to the way his arms are braced. It's hard work and his breathing has gotten harsher, echoing over the now-suspiciously quiet and open comm.

Captain America comes around the corner at a dead run and skids to slow down, staring at him. Tony’s body wrenches away from the SUV and steps forward, arms raising; with no pause at all, Cap rolls into cover behind a taxi and then sprints to the next abandoned vehicle, dodging and weaving and working his way closer in furious silence.

Tony really hopes Steve has a plan, because his repulsors are disabled but the armor still has missiles. Perhaps he shouldn’t be thinking that too loudly.

His arms lower. Shit.

His finger twitches up the HUD menu. Shit!

But JARVIS disabled all targeting. Most of the options are grayed out. If it was him, he thinks loudly, trapped in a powered-down suit with no targeting, he’d have already jimmied one of the missile ports open and be setting up to throw a few like grenades.

Whatever is in control of his body ignores this decoy plan, which is a shame since it would have taken at least two or three minutes to force open a missile port. The HUD menu is navigated by gaze tracking and gestures; it is extremely disconcerting to not be able to look away or close his eyes to slow himself down, and--aw fuck, it’s as he thought, the purely defensive weapons are still accessible. Tony thinks desperately about the mother of all yawns and manages to achieve it, halting gaze tracking for several seconds.

The HUD picks up a sweep of purposeful motion; from the depths of the menu tree, Tony catches it in the corner of his eye. _About time._

Cap’s shield catches him under the chin and lifts the armor right off its feet, then shoves forward into the hardest, fastest takedown Tony’s ever seen, much less experienced. He’s still drawing a reflexive, shocked gasp as Cap, not satisfied with gravity, accelerates the armor down _faster,_ driving it into the ground and knocking the breath out of him again. The helmet and shoulders take the impact, with a horrible screechy crunch from the armor’s throat under the edge of the shield.

Steve puts his other hand under the shield and rolls it away, then slams it edge-on into the asphalt between Tony's arm and body, right up under his armpit. Tony flinches, not entirely sure his arm is still connected for a second, but no, he can still feel it fine. His other arm is caught up under his back, palm-down, stuck and kept there by Steve's knee. His body arches and twists but Steve weighs a hell of a lot more than Tony can shift from this position, and he's centered right where Tony has the least leverage.

And oh shit, Tony must still have been tripping from that impact because Cap's hand is on his throat, and Cap doesn't flail, Cap knows what he's doing and what he is doing is wedging his fingers up between the under-chin plate and the neck. There's a seam there where the two plates slide against each other--machined to micrometer tolerances of course--and covered by a flexible seal in the armor's second layer, but Cap's shield strike has actually _crumpled_ both plates by more than a little and opened a gap between them. The bent edges dig into Tony's neck and jaw uncomfortably, thankfully not cutting off his air.

Tony hears a clanging, a huge resounding noise with familiar bell-like overtones. After a moment he realizes it's his free hand, beating against the other side of the shield, nearly drowning out the _click-click-click-click_ of its repulsor mechanism triggering over and over. Then Steve gets his thumb past the cables, through the undersuit and all the way to the wild pulse hammering just under Tony's jaw, and really starts bearing down. Tony gapes inside the helmet, frantically tries to hunch up but Cap has a good grip on the helmet's chin and no way is it going anywhere, and then he starts panicking because Cap is serious, he's not letting up, not-- He arches, scrabbling and scratching the gauntlet's fingertips across the shield with a _scree_ he can barely hear over the roaring in his ears while black whorls cover his vision and--

\--and he's back to a stabbing pain in his head, tingling lips and fuzzy gray swathes replacing the black. He thinks he's lying absolutely still. Same position, only choked out for a few seconds. "JARVIS," he hears Steve say in his ultra-calm Situation FUBAR voice, "open the faceplate for me." It pops open and the fuzzy gray gets a lot brighter and acquires colors and an indistinct blob that might be Steve's face very close. "Steve," Tony tries to say, but a strangled cough comes out instead and yeah, the suit has taken a lot of damage to the throat area and his voice might be wrecked for a while.

And then he feels his arm rise and start beating against the shield again.

Steve must be able to read the horror on his face this time, because he leans in. "Tony, you're being controlled? If you can respond, blink twice."

Tony _tries_ , he tries, but the best he can manage is a sort of flutter. So reflexes and some involuntary actions can get through, but voluntary ones are still no, unless he's dazed and reeling or--not fully conscious, _interesting_ , the odds that this was a rogue telepath just went _way up_ , and dammit that still did not really distract him from this situation, because Cap is speaking again. "We need to get the armor off. I don't want to keep choking him out. Or-- Nat, do you have anything?"

Her voice comes from somewhere out of his line of sight. "The only aerosols I have are Hulkbuster, they'd kill him. I have a couple normal tranks but they need to be injected into muscle. His face would not work. Sadly."

 _"Captain,"_ JARVIS speaks up, tinny and tiny from the helmet's internal speakers, but from the tensing of Steve's legs he’s audible to supersoldier ears even over the clanging that _still_ will not stop, _Jesus_ , why can't this telepath realize they're beat--but no, wait, scratch that, a smart telepath would have made it look like Tony had control and gotten Steve to loosen his hold. So, yay? Fuck fuck fuck. Yay.

 _"...I can release the armor at a voice command from Mr. Stark. I recommend that be tried before attempting to disassemble or pry it apart with the tools at your disposal."_ Namely, the shield. Yeah. Horrifyingly effective, maybe, but Tony does not want to be on the inside of that experiment.

"JARVIS, you think he can speak?"

_"After the Hulk threw him into the parking garage wall, he ordered me to cut all power to the armor."_

"I saw that," Steve says. "He fell out of the air before he recovered from the impact. I thought he'd been knocked unconscious."

"After he bounced off a concrete wall," Natasha says thoughtfully. "And after you choked him, he tried to talk." She walks into view and Cap and Black Widow peer down at him. Tony really, really wishes the clanging would stop. It's just awkward. Also, it's pretty loud with his helmet open and his headache is bad enough already.

"Right," Steve says. Shit! Tony would like to say he really does not approve of this method, but oh right he _can't_ , so thumb on carotid artery, check, pressure, check, cue up _even more awkward_ involuntary gasping and struggling, second verse same as the first--

\--and it's uh, he's uh, oh god his head hurts.

He gasps, coughs, gasps, double-blinks his streaming eyes and rasps "JARVIS, armor sesame." The armor powers up briefly, just long enough to disengage the mechanical locks with a series of pings--Steve's hand tenses--and then the pieces start to loosen, fold up into each other and fall off, while Tony carries on double-blinking madly. He counts seven sets of double blinks before his body stops responding to him and instead starts squirming under Steve, trying again to get out of the hold with the bulky armor mostly out of the way. Thankfully Steve is having none of it, although he does reach over and pin Tony's arm. Tony is not sure, at the moment, whether he appreciates this more because the telepath won't break his now-unprotected human hand on the shield or because the clanging won't start again.

Regardless, he's never been happier to see Natasha coming for him with a needle, although he can't actually see it because Steve's in the way. It stings, going in a few inches above his knee, but he can feel it working after just a minute. He relaxes, body heavy and cold, and at long last manages another double blink. And another, and another.

"Steve," Tony slurs, "don' choke me again. Everybody okay?"

"They're okay," Steve says. He's turned his face half-away and the cowl blocks Tony from seeing his eyes, but his mouth is in the grip of some powerful emotion.

"Clint?"

"He's fine, just spooked. What happened?"

"Telepath. I think. Keyed to me, _still trying_ , goddamn motherfucking bastard, Jesus, shit! JARVIS, thank you, JARVIS, thank you," Tony says. He's feeling heavy-eyed but he has quite a tolerance for depressants so he's gonna pass along as much info as he can. "You knew jus' what I meant..."

 _"I am sorry I could not do more, sir,"_ JARVIS says solemnly, and Tony knows he's blaming himself for having no protocol, for not anticipating this somehow.

"No buddy, we got a date okay? Won't be sorry next time." They are going to put their heads together and Tony is going to kick and scream all the way, but JARVIS is going to get some autonomy over the suit, because this was not okay. It's just implementation, just the problem of how to do it securely, but that's a problem they can solve. "Cap," Tony goes on, "thank you, oh god you're terrifying, I won't ever make fun of you again today."

"Anytime," Steve says, and has the effrontery to grin down at Tony before slowly, watchfully, removing his grip on Tony's throat.

"Careful," Tony mumbles, "bastard still has hooks in me. Can only talk...because I'm tranked to the gills."

"Most people would be out cold," Natasha remarks.

"It's 'cause...I get drunk... _all the_ time," Tony says, caught between pure glee that alcohol finally did him some good and resigned horror that people he respects are seeing him like this. Though nowhere, nowhere near the horror of seeing his repulsors pointing at Clint.

"We know," Steve says. "But Tony, you can clock out. We'll find the telepath."

"Yeah?"

"Thor and Clint are looking. Natasha will go too, as soon as you’re out."

"Yeah?" Tony considers. "Yeah. Okay. Get all the armor. Don't leave any pieces."

_"I'll count, sir."_

"JARVIS will keep us honest. And I'll keep an eye on you."

Tony closes his eyes just for a second, and sighs, and the next thing he remembers--


	2. Skew

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "For the record,” Tony's voice went flat, “I would rather be honestly impaired.”

Tony woke up in SHIELD medical. It was, he noted, the same room as last time.

For various reasons windows were not common on the lower decks of the helicarrier, but this cabin had one, angled halfway between floor and wall (hull, actually) and well visible from the bed. The flow of clouds over the deeply shadowed land-and-sea below was _mesmerizing_ on the right kind of painkillers.

He stared for he didn't know how long, then tracked a quiet cough toward the door to see Steve standing there, tall and miserable and bearing a cup and straw. He came beside the bed and held the cup while Tony drank. "Your throat probably hurts," Steve said.

Tony raised an eyebrow and shrugged. "I'm allowed--" he cleared his throat and finished in a more normal tone--"allowed to talk though, right?"

"Yes. No permanent damage to your larynx, just bruises."

"Okay."

"What is it that's so interesting out there?" Steve said some time later.

"Hmmm...? The vortices."

"Where?" Steve bent so his head was on the same level.

"About thirty meters out. There's a standing wave where laminar airflow around the helicarrier transitions to turbulent."

"I see it." Steve's whole face sharpened with interest.

"It's just above the dew point out there right now. Normally you can't see the structure so clearly, you just have to know it's there. I've surfed on it, you know, in the suit. Like a dolphin." Tony grinned at the memory, then took a mental step back--clearly not on the usual painkillers here--but Steve was smiling in a surprised sort of way so things were okay so far.

"A dolphin?"

"The standing wave out there is one of the biggest, but there are others. I found them when they first launched her and I did an air survey for the rough spots--can't eliminate them completely, I tried--and mapped out approach and escort lanes, and then I found out how fun they were, in the suit. Rip a small plane apart, but I can just tumble." Tony stopped talking before he could describe anything else, like how sometimes he cut the HUD and asked JARVIS to take the yoke, use just enough repulsors to keep him from falling out of the turbulent air; spinning, out of control, in touch with something bigger than himself in the most visceral way he could find. How he needed that sometimes after the worst days, before he could sit in a room with half-family half-strangers and try not to hurt anyone who didn't deserve it.

“What am I on?” he asked abruptly, bringing up a hand to rub his face--then trying again when his hand wouldn’t move. _Paralyzed?_ The jolt of panic shook the bed and established that it wasn’t drug-induced or any other kind of paralysis, just four-point restraints. “What the--” Tony jerked again, then pulled steadily, trying to establish materials, mechanism, bedframe attachment points--just as quickly concluding SHIELD-standard for all three. He stopped pulling and stared at Steve, wondering if he looked as pale as he felt. “What the _fuck?”_

Steve rubbed his own face. “You’re on several things,” he said. “According to Bruce, they’ll be out of your system in six to eight hours. Until then, I stay here and the restraints stay on. I’m sorry.”

Tony blinked, rubbed his nose on his shoulder and looked up at the ceiling, because Steve looked tired and that kept stalling his brain reboot. “One is a tranquilizer,” he said, “and one is maybe a thiopental derivative, because I _think_ I’m thinking clearly but I’m thinking about the wrong things. For the record,” his voice went flat, “I would rather be honestly impaired.”

Steve met his eyes and nodded. “Noted.”

And the fact that Captain America _would_ remember didn’t make it an easier answer to settle for.

“Was it a telepath?” Tony said after a few minutes. “Tell me you caught him/her/it.” If they hadn’t-- The restraints were serious business though, overall a much stabler situation than being choked out by Captain America if your goal was to avoid incidentally murdering your teammates. He brightened and rotated his wrists in the thickly padded cuffs. Only slightly chafed. He hadn’t been absent for any homicidal frenzies then. He just wished he didn’t feel so goddamned chipper about it.

“Natasha caught him, and yes it was a telepath, connected to you and watching the street--but we can’t figure out how he did it. SHIELD put him in a shielded room and all their sensors say he’s not a strong talent. That normally he wouldn’t be capable of more than touch empathy.”

“Did he have an amplifying device? Something near him or--planted in my armor? No, JARVIS would have...” Tony trailed off, thinking.

“JARVIS checked the armor. Nothing that shouldn’t be there, he said.”

“So the telepath,” Tony prompted when Steve didn’t continue. Steve rubbed his eyes.

“His surroundings, his effects, his person...we’ve been checking.”

“You’ve been checking,” Tony repeated. A trickle of ice went down his back. “He’s still connected to me, isn’t he?”

Steve looked at him steadily. “That’s what we’re testing. Hill says they broke the connection, Bruce says they might have, and we got the go-ahead to wake you up.”

“The go-ahead?” He jerked at the restraints. “How long have they had me?”

“We’ve been here the whole time, Tony--”

“How _long?_ Where’s JARVIS? How _long?”_

Warm hands landed on his wrists, just above the cuffs. “It’s okay, just two days, that’s all, it’s okay.” Maybe it was the touch, maybe the sudden chestful of super soldier, maybe the clean smell of Rogers’ shampoo; for whatever reason, the inane litany worked and Tony blinked rapidly as the pressing weight of incipient panic lifted and he was calm.

Wait.

“Oh, you did not. You did not _even_. Not just thiopental, but interrogation drugs? I’m tanked up with the fucking brainwash cocktail?!”

Steve let go of him. “Yes.”

“And when were you gonna share this bit of intel? When I was _cooperative_ enough? No, wait, subjects’ knowledge of the drug decreases the effect, that’s why it’s best administered--without--consent!” Steve opened his mouth to speak and Tony cut him off, flat and dead. “If you touch me again, or tell me to calm down, I swear to God, Rogers, I will _end_ you.”

Steve looked away and retreated to his chair. “I know.”

“Do you?” Tony was shaking slightly. It was disconcerting that he couldn’t stop. Fury and terror and numb detachment, and Steve might not know what he was feeling but supersoldier eyes weren’t missing the outward signs.

“I know. That’s why I’m the only one in here.” Steve gestured at the door. “That’s why Clint and Natasha are trading off guard duty, and Bruce and JARVIS have put info lockdown on all the feeds from this room.”

“JARVIS, if you’re here, talk to me please,” Tony ordered. The outline of a phone lit up in Steve’s breast pocket. 

_“I am here, sir.”_

“Okay, listen. Initiate protocol theta, uh, theta-two. Passphrase ‘I want a cracker.’”

_“Input accepted.”_

“Coda,” Tony said, and paused. “Root access to revoke or invoke protocol also granted to Rogers, Steve, at _your_ discretion, JARVIS.”

_“Coda accepted. Protocol theta-two: are you sure?”_

“Sure as I’ll ever be. Which is, it’s a horrible idea.”

_“Coda: are you sure?”_

“No.”

 _“Protocol initiated. Directive initiated. Steve Rogers granted root access.”_ The lights dimmed, very slightly, for a moment.

“Gonna tell me what you’re doing, J?”

_“No, sir. Though you could try ‘please.’”_

Tony rolled his eyes. “They grow up so fast,” he told Steve. "Don't think I'm not pissed, by the way. I am, it'll just have to wait for the fucking _thiopental_ to wear off. Six to eight _hours?_ What the hell happened? I mean, a fuckup this bad, I’m usually--but I wasn’t even awake,” he added plaintively.

Steve rubbed his face. "I'd describe this as a joint Avengers/SHIELD fuckup," he said. "You were safely out of the decision-making chain. Do you mind if I ask Bruce to come down and explain the details? He said something about wanting baselines from you when you woke up."

"Bruce is here? Good. I'm good with him, he's fine. Is he okay?"

 _"Dr Banner has been notified,"_ JARVIS said softly.

"I think so. He keeps breaking things by accident, but he seems okay. He'll be glad to see you conscious."

"How far did the Hulk get?"

Steve smiled ruefully. "Just Jersey. He kept his comm in this time, and came roaring back when Natasha convinced him it was enemy action."

"Clint. You said he was okay before. He is okay? He's not just repulsored only a little or some macho crap like that? I know how he gets. You know how he gets."

"He’s fine; Hulk blocked the shot. Clint swears he was going to dodge anyway."

“Uh-huh, is that what he says. You might want--”

Bruce banged in, breathing hard. He spared just a glance for Steve and went straight for the bed, grabbing Tony's hand where the cuff held it at the edge of the mattress. "Tony," he said.

Tony gripped back, grateful for the contact and grateful that it was limited. "Hey Brucie. Tell Big Green thanks from me, and also that Clint owes him a solid. As many free archer tosses as he wants. Iron Man tosses are always free, of course," he added, wiggling an eyebrow.

"Tony," Bruce took a deep breath. "In addition to standard painkillers, there's a chance that you're feeling the effect of SHIELD interrogation drugs. They wouldn't tell me everything they use, but JARVIS says you're probably safe from interactions, and he's monitoring just in case."

So they were serious about that info lockdown. Bruce really hadn’t been listening. "Yeah," Tony said vaguely, and did not glance at Steve. "I noticed that. All that. Bruce, how dangerous am I right now? I'm really..." He stretched a little, testing the restraints again. "I'm really not going to like this when I start coming out of it. This whole observation period thing, is this single-blind, double-blind, what?"

Bruce sighed. "Let me go in order. When you started acting crazy, the team concluded--with decisive input from JARVIS--that however it was happening, there was an active external agent. They had no idea how to shield you from it, so they moved to take you down."

"I went in to neutralize the remaining threat from the armor and get you out of it,” Steve said. “JARVIS said the armor itself wasn’t compromised in any way he could detect, so we assumed something was getting between you and the armor or affecting you directly."

"JARVIS showed me your readings afterward,” Bruce continued. “Huge increases in physiological stress; he says you show spikes but never sustain levels like that normally."

"It wasn't mind control," Tony said. "I didn't... I could see everything that was going on."

Bruce flicked Steve a look. Neither of them seemed surprised.

Tony sighed and closed his eyes. His finely tuned bad-news sensor let him know more was coming. Pretending to fall asleep in meetings always made Fury speed it up, or made the meetings louder, one of the two.

“Widow knocked you out,” Bruce said, “and while SHIELD medics were checking you over and coming up negative for anything obvious, the team went over the area with a fine-toothed comb and Widow found a civilian conscious but mostly paralyzed on the floor in one of the nearby hotels.”

“Paralyzed?” Tony opened his eyes at that.

“JARVIS pointed out that his heartbeat synchronized exactly with yours. Not just in frequency. In _phase_.”

Tony tried to sit up, ran into the cuffs again, and settled for giving Bruce a transfixed look. “Do tell,” he invited.

"SHIELD detained him and pulled out the EMG kit. We found that his peripheral nervous system was mediated by yours."

"What? Mediated how? Biology, Brucie, small words please."

"Action potentials in his nervous system were mirrored in yours, without volition on your part--you were unconscious--and what's more, his action potentials showed attenuation in direct relationship to the strength of the action potentials measured in your system, so that superficially he showed effects of your sedation. I think the autonomic stuff like resting heartbeat was a weak sympathetic side effect, um, analogous to crosstalk--the effect was most marked in voluntary motor control. Overwhelmingly strong, there."

"When he moved his arm, I moved mine."

"And he _couldn't_ move his arm _unless_ you moved yours," Bruce corrected. "Most of the energy of the impulse seemed to be going to you, and the more your system absorbed the less was left over."

"Nerve impulses are electro _chemical_ energy! Ions have mass, they can't just--they can't just teleport into another person. How--!?"

"You're asking _me_ about mechanism? I said the word 'quantum' and Hill looked like she wanted to kill and eat me. I did at least rule out every field type and form of radiation that the labs up here can detect."

"No-one's ever pinned down a mechanism for psychic powers," Tony mused. "Isn't the current research into--"

"Entanglement, yeah," Bruce sighed. "I know you used to run with some of them, and Richards still does, but that entanglement crowd is completely--"

"Round the bend, I know," Tony said fondly. "You would not _believe_ the shit that goes down at their conferences. There was one party once--"

“Gentlemen,” Steve said. Bruce and Tony exchanged the _save your place, science resumes later_ look, and Tony dragged himself back to the topic hanging over them.

"I think I can guess how it went down after that point. Tell me if I'm in the ballpark." Bruce nodded, his cheer gone, and Tony went on. "So they had a knocked-out Avenger neurochemically connected to a person of extreme interest, who was demonstrating unknown mind-control-type powers in front of an organization that, however autonomous, is still a branch of the U.S. military. But no matter how persuasive the question, he wouldn't talk. Because he _couldn't_ , because _I_ was unconscious. Was he already doped up by the time everyone figured that out?"

"Yes," Steve said grimly. "A decision made without our input."

"We could have stopped them," said Bruce, taking off his glasses.

"Not without--" Steve started, and "How?" Tony said over him, morbidly curious.

"In a sense, I have veto power over anything that happens in the Helicarrier. It's an enclosed space, isolated..."

"Yeah, but you wouldn't use it," Tony pointed out.

"See, that's where you're all of you wrong," Bruce said mildly. "If I’d known that drugging him would affect you, I could. I might. Not intending to hurt people or bring down the 'carrier, but to grab you and get you in a suit and get out. And if that was a bit much for the other guy, JARVIS would help."

_"Yes."_

Tony raised his eyebrows, glancing over at the phone JARVIS was still speaking through. "Bridges burned for me, the best kind of charred, smoking, irrevocable bridges. My disciples have learned well. How surprised should I be that I woke up here?"

“Surprised. Medium surprised. Well. Pretty surprised,” Bruce admitted, polishing his glasses for the third time.

Steve shook his head. "We discussed whether that was warranted. I talked them out of it. Even after... I didn’t change my mind. It's my responsibility."

"After what?"

"They adjusted your sedative to one that didn't block motor firing,” Steve said simply, muscles bunching in his jaw.

The world goes flat and far away for a few seconds, but he knows how to cover that sort of thing and he’s back with hardly a pause, Bruce’s grip hard and a little frantic on his hand. “So that’s why the restraints,” Tony says distantly.

 _“Dr Banner, Captain--”_ JARVIS warns, but doesn’t stop whatever someone is saying--

“--didn’t realize before he’d gotten your hand on the arc reactor and was trying to eject--”

Tony slips away again, a little longer. There’s roaring in his ears but it’s restful, like diving underwater. His chest hurts too, a lot like--okay, _too much_ like diving underwater, enough of this.

He comes back gasping so hard the bed is shaking, pushing against the cuffs, trying to get his hands farther from his chest than they are already. Not really possible; he doesn’t have that much room to move. But the thought of his body, unconscious, someone else’s words using his mouth to get said--someone else using his hands to access the reactor--in the armor, he’d been a danger to everyone around him, but safe from that at least. He tucks his chin, trying to get a good look at the reactor under the thin blue fabric of the scrubs he’s wearing. It seems normal--JARVIS would have run a full set of diagnostics--is the edge _not quite flush with the housing?_

It must just be him. It must be the angle. Captain America wouldn’t overlook that, _Bruce_ wouldn’t overlook misalignment, and anyway JARVIS would--he’d catch it. Tony’s sure he’d catch it.

“Did Clint say?” Tony mumbles. “The first thing the telepath tried to do was blow my head off.” There’s a bit of a stir around him but he can’t take his eyes off the reactor. “He gunned for me first, then anyone else on the team I could--... But he would have settled for me? Not the way to maximize damage. J, how far did he get with the reactor?” He listens closely but there must be several people talking and he can’t pick out JARVIS’ response. The longer he looks the more his chest hurts. Almost certainly psychosomatic, but--it _hurts._

There’s movement next to his face and he jerks his head away, then tries to jump right out of his skin as something small skitters along the side of his neck and catches in the loose ties of his shirt. He can’t see what it is, but for a second he’s back on the couch with Obie so powerfully it’s like vertigo, like the Helicarrier falling out of the sky and the sawtooth whine reaching in his ear and cutting all his strings. His rejection is instant, utter, at a level below thought. He bucks and kicks, trying to shake it _off_ , trying to defend himself and protect the reactor. He’s not paralyzed but he’s down and pinned and there’s nothing to push against, no edge or surface he can find. He pulls until his muscles creak, until pain flares up and steals his breath, and then he has to go limp and focus on finding enough air.

He opens his eyes and there’s a phone in his face. There’s a _phone_ in his face, last year’s Storm X3, and it’s lit up and showing a lolcat and it’s _Steve’s_ phone, what the hell is it doing in his face? ...Steve’s holding it there?

 _“Sir. Sir. Sir,”_ JARVIS is saying, until he catches the moment Tony starts tracking again and segues smoothly into a flow of words designed to snare him in the present, because at one point they’d had this down not only to a science but an art.

_”Sir, it is July 7th, 3:14 PM. At eleven thousand feet, the sky is clear with an outside air temperature of 52 degrees Fahrenheit, relative wind speed 35 knots. You are in SHIELD medical, on the Helicarrier. This location is secure. The armor is slightly damaged, and is in lockdown in armory bay D1. You had a flashback when Dr Banner attempted to fit you with a standard earbud and throat mic to enable me to talk with you privately. Please indicate that you can hear me.”_

He double-taps his fingers against Banner’s in one of the oldest gestures that he and JARVIS share. He’s not in his workshop or in the armor, but the camera in this cabin would have a fisheye lens, resolution higher-than-HD, not to mention the phone camera; JARVIS can see the motion, can probably read his pulse from the flutter of the skin at his throat. Banner reaches over and retrieves the earbud, being slow and obvious about it. He doesn't have to touch anything but fabric.

 _”What do you need?”_ JARVIS presses. The phone is back in Cap’s breast pocket.

Tony doesn’t want to talk. He shudders all over, trying to relax--wishing he was alone, because the room seems awfully crowded with Banner claiming one hand and Cap the other. “Chest hurts,” he says anyway. “I need to--I need to check the reactor.”

Banner and Cap and JARVIS have a conversation, most of which Tony tunes out--deliberately, this time. He’s hearing it, he’ll replay it if he needs to.

Banner--Bruce--squeezes his hand, getting his attention. “Do you need to change positions?”

He considers it. His elbows are bent at about right angles, hands palm-up at shoulder level. The position pulls less on his upper chest than if his arms were straight, but it’s still not great, and he’s probably been in it too long. “Yeah.”

“Okay. We’re going to shift your arms, one at a time, and you can check the reactor while we do it.”

That tricks him into eye contact, and Bruce is looking down but Steve is right there waiting for it, pale but steady as the ocean floor. “I’ll keep hold of your hand,” he says.

All right. Low-tech solution, but all right.

First Bruce makes the bed sit up, raising it from near-prone, which makes Tony feel better as soon as the unpleasant dizziness recedes, and then Steve comes around to his right side and grips his hand while Bruce works on the cuff. It loosens, then opens completely, and Tony drags Steve’s arm toward the reactor like he’s got a braking chute made entirely of muscle. Steve considerately shifts his grip down toward Tony’s wrist, leaving his fingers free, and Tony undoes the ties on his shirt one-handed and pushes the fabric out of the way. There it is, matte grey titanium caging the blue of a hot young star.

At first he just sets his hand on it--it's warm, as it always is, with the reactor set to waste just enough heat to balance the temperature inside the housing with the temperature of his body on the outside. Blue Cherenkov light wells up through the leaded diamond facing and spills through his fingers.

The reactor never felt foreign, not like that first crude magnet. It had always felt like an opportunity. As exhilarating as a fall, as terrifying as an open door. He took a deep breath, pressing lightly to feel it in his chest.

"Is that--" Bruce said.

"Harmless wavelengths only, it's shielded. You--oh. You haven't looked at it yet." They were both staring.

"The nurse told me SHIELD medical has standing orders to cover it and leave it alone," Steve said. "I saw it for a second yesterday, but--you've never talked about it. It didn't feel right to pry."

"Yeah, I threw the mother of all shitfits when the Air Force got too interested once. But anyway," Tony gestured, _voila._ "Needs must, so take a good long look now, kids. Just, not taking questions today. Anything you truly need to know, JARVIS'll tell you."

_"Ah. I am sir's medical next-of-kin."_

“You are? Why didn’t you tell us yesterday?” Bruce sounded--something. Not surprised; disappointed?

 _“As you were taking my advice, I did not need to.”_ JARVIS softened. _”I prefer to have sir’s permission.”_

Tony let the words roll over him. He’d figured a conversation like this would occur someday, but he never thought he’d be awake and included in it. Sort of like how he’d never expected to actually invoke protocol theta-two, since logically speaking, if he was ever so compromised he needed to be locked out of S.I.’s systems, it was the last thing he’d choose to do.

In the smaller realm of things within his reach, the scarred skin around the reactor was normal, no heat or swelling. He circled the edge of the facing with his fingertips twice; it was flush. It was flush, but--"J, how far did he get? And what's Mr Grudge's name anyway?"

_"He is still a John Doe; and I’m afraid I was prevented from seeing his action by the lack of adequate camera coverage in your previous room. Captain Rogers gave the alarm."_

More eye contact. He jerked his eyes away before he could try to analyze Cap's lack of expression.

"I saw it from off to the side, not from above," Steve said, "but he'd gotten a hand on it and was turning it in the socket. If that's how you pop it out, he didn't get as far as that."

"I play with biometrics," Tony muttered, "I hook it into the network, into the suit, and what works? The child lock. The fucking _child-proof lock_ that I only put in because why not." He tapped a finger on the facing, then pushed gently. The reactor rotated freely in its socket, and he hissed at the sharp, unexpected twinge in his chest. "That--that is not supposed to hurt."

Steve’s grip firmed and he lifted Tony’s hand away a few inches; Tony let him, thinking furiously. The connections for the Mark I reactor, the original, were an eldritch horror held together with hope and twist-ties, but for Mark II he had overhauled the whole base of the housing and it was all pretty streamlined down in there now, nothing really to get bent or caught on or--ooooh. "Steve, did he turn it a bunch of times? Like, a whole bunch of times. Did he _actually think_ it _unscrewed.”_

“...Maybe?” Steve hazarded. It had been a fun morning a couple months back, introducing him to child-proof lids.

“Did he turn it a whole bunch of--”

“Yes, he turned it a whole bunch of times,” Steve said, brow furrowed, reviewing his magnificent memory. (He probably didn’t still bear a grudge about the video clips. Or the animated GIFs--there was one in particular where vitamins went all over the counter; 4chan loved that one.) “He turned it a full three-sixty at least twice that I saw.”

Tony grinned. Steve pulled his hand farther away from the reactor, which, no. “Stop that, I’m not crazy,” he said reasonably. “It’s a novel problem, I love those.”

_”Sir’s readings since waking strongly suggest that the drugs affecting him are buffering negative emotions and allowing them to taper off more quickly than normal.”_

“Thank god,” Tony said. “What? That aspect is not all bad. Usually a flashback bugs me for days.” It was true; he was already at home in his skin again, fully engaged. He could remember _what_ he had felt without re-feeling it. Shit, this was serious, he better get this stuff out of his system soon or he’d be trying to get it from SHIELD, which was such a bad idea.

Steve took a breath, then let it out slowly, muscles in his jaw jumping; Bruce dropped his gaze and focused on his tablet, mouth a deep line. Neither of them said anything, but neither of them met Tony's eyes either.

It made his stomach twist, how vulnerable he was. If they asked right now, he’d probably tell them. Why the earbud set him off. How many times something else had. Secrets that were tattered and small now, set against the momentous things his team did, but they were his own and the others had no right to know.

“Good, great, excellent,” Tony said, as if anyone had spoken out loud. “This is not the moment, let's move on. J, care to give me odds that the backup cable got twisted because our villain was doing it wrong?”

JARVIS paused a beat. _"Over ninety percent. My apologies."_

If the cable developed bad contact, the daemon that monitored normal function of the reactor would throw an error during its periodic handshakes with the much more sophisticated pacemaker program, but there was otherwise no sensor or diagnostic for unintended force on the cable’s ports. JARVIS couldn’t have known. "No biggie. That's why, you know, that's why we shouldn't have skipped all the user testing. Why'd you let me do that anyway? I thought we learned our lesson with the reverse-polish MP3 player. If it doesn't pass the Dummy test, it never goes to market."

 _"The mind reels, sir, and can only be thankful the arc reactor is not on the market."_ Though it had, in fact, passed the Dummy test.

"That's right," Tony said. "Gotta untwist that cable, snap snap! Steve, I need my hand back. It’s my dominant hand, I need it." Tugging on him was like tugging on the Quinjet.

"Is this a good idea?" Steve said, not moving.

_"I will tell you if I am concerned, Captain. But it is best if sir removes the reactor himself."_

Steve transferred the look to him. “Is that what you’re going to do?” 

“You have a cable?” Bruce broke in, obviously still catching up. He’d made an interesting face at the mention of user testing.

"Yes, I have a cable. Shut up. It’s under the reactor. Remember how, uhh--how teens would tangle themselves in phone cords, when phones had cords?" He had no idea if that had been a thing in the forties. Sixties, for sure. Fifties? Fuck it, close enough. “Well, untangling your hapless teen’s a lot faster if you take the phone off the hook, and I’m just gonna pop it out for a minute, it’ll still be _connected,_ funny enough it has a cable for that, my god Steve, do I have to draw you a picture?” Tony demanded. He sucked in a breath to explain he’d need his hand for that too, but Steve gave in all at once with the half-smile he had sometimes and let go.

He kept two fingers on the back of Tony’s wrist. But that was okay. 

Tony pressed three fingertips on the facing of the reactor, rotating a few degrees at a time until he found the hidden pressure sensors. The reactor locked in place with a solid _chunk_ that reverberated around his ribs to his spine, though it didn’t hurt, exactly. He grimaced and pressed again, resetting the tumblers and freeing it to turn, then went to work. Maybe any two-bit villain could get _this_ far, but he’d defy them to actually beat the child lock. Thirty degrees right-- _click._ Eighteen degrees left, then left again, feeling each tumbler bolt retract with a little thump in his breastbone.

“I just--sorry, I thought you’d be completely wireless,” Bruce trolled, sharing a glance with Steve.

"Well, at least it's discreet. Doesn't plug into his navel or anything," Steve offered.

"You two can shut up any time now," Tony grumbled. As soon as he got this last tumbler--there. He felt the click from both sides as the last catch disengaged, pressed further down once more-- _ow_ \--to eject it, and lifted the reactor out of the socket with a sliding hiss as it lost its air seal. The momentary negative pressure inside the socket always made his heart skip a beat--this time mixed with relief, because the cable was twisted up like a wrung-out towel and giving it room to turn into a spiral vanished some of the pressure/pain immediately.

Usually he laid the reactor on his shoulder or stomach where the cable would reach easily, but today these were not flat surfaces, because he was sitting _up._ He flailed for a second, hand full, but then Steve helpfully stuck out his free hand and Tony put the reactor in it quick, face down, and untwisted everything some more.

"Oh look, it's rainbow," Bruce said.

"It's a specialized _control bus_ , you hippie, have you never taken apart a computer?"

Bruce patted his hand. "You have a little rainbow ribbon cable in your chest, Tony. That's okay."

"This doesn't change our opinion of you," Steve said earnestly.

"Shut up. Got a mirror? No, wait--Bruce, get out Steve’s phone, even last year’s model can--yeah, hold it up like--there." JARVIS relayed a feed of the inside of the socket to the phone’s stereoscopic screen, popping up arrows until Bruce had gotten enough angles to render a full pseudo-3D view.

 _“No apparent damage,”_ JARVIS concluded, zooming in to the phone’s max resolution. Tony nodded and ceremoniously reached in to wiggle the socket end of the cable. The dull ache intensified and he grimaced; if force on the connector caused pain on the other side of the socket, there was some highly targeted medical scanning in his near future, once JARVIS got him back to the workshop. And just after that, some redesigns. He'd built in a millimeter or so of wiggle room for the sake of maintaining good contact given that the cable was so difficult to access, but it would be better if he firmed it up and used a more heavy-duty connector on the socket end--something near-permanent, officially make the reactor end the one unplugged when he swapped reactors... Yeah.

Speaking of which. He unhooked the connector catches, then pulled the socket end of the cable out all the way and firmly reseated it.

_"Sir!"_

Steve gripped Tony's forearm hard, finding a nerve that made his hand open, and lifted it away from the socket. "What did he do?"

"I just--" Tony wiggled his fingers, "--unplugged and replugged it. First step when you have an iffy connection."

_"In this situation, perhaps if you could explain your actions ahead of time."_

_"So you know,_ I'm doing the reactor end too while it's out."

"I could--" Bruce said.

"No," Tony cut him off. "No one else handles the reactor." He was vaguely aware that he'd tensed up, and Bruce's eyes cut back and forth between his face and something above his head that must be displaying his stats.

Steve cut deliberations short by bringing the reactor to Tony's hand. Tony reseated the cable quickly before anyone else could object and locked the catches on both cable ends, then took the reactor back and looked it over for signs of wear or failure. "Anything abnormal, J?"

_"Not that I can detect with current imaging. Are you still in pain?"_

"Mm," Tony said noncommittally, aware that two other actual people were not only in the same room but touching him. He used Steve's free hand as a reactor-rest one more time and busied himself tucking the cable away, folded exactly into its space. "Want to do some scans back at the tower."

And then _shiss-chunk_ and he was whole again, glowing through the cloth he spread back across the ropy white scars and soft-polished metal. He fumbled one-handed with the shirt ties for a couple seconds, then gave up and let Steve guide his hand down to hip level. His left shoulder ached in a good way as Bruce shifted that hand too, and the change in position was more of a relief than he expected.

 _"No indication of internal bleeding around the housing. Pacemaker functioning normally,"_ JARVIS reported softly after a minute or two of machinery humming below the bed.

"Mm," Tony said, battling waves of warmth from the usual adrenaline endorphins.

And Bruce seemed to think he wanted a blanket.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter 2 was getting just ridiculously long. So now...? There will be _three_.


	3. Antiphase

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tony swallowed, and said it loudly. "Single-blind study, keeping me in the dark to avoid bias. Me and John Doe are still connected, aren't we? Or at least you've got no proof the connection was broken. He was just knocked out, same as me--has been all this time--and sometime soon he wakes up."

He roused later; he wasn’t sure what woke him. A muttered question had JARVIS confirming he’d slept for two hours.

Three-and-a-half to five-and-a-half more hours of this. 

Bruce was gone, probably looking after John Doe or, hell, eating or sleeping or something. Steve was in the corner chair, reading. He looked up and smiled, but Tony narrowed his eyes and Steve returned to his book, unperturbed.

Tony considered himself. Well-awake now, he felt more clear-headed for the sleep, and not too uncomfortable. Hungry, now that he thought about it, and he really should eat. But still, there were more important things. His _mind_ itched.

"Hey, J. You have enough rez in here to pick up microgestures, right?" He had an hour or two of work in him. "Give me something to do."

JARVIS was perceptive. The backburner project he picked sent Tony deep, deep into the conceptual; not dirty-hands work but the sort of coding that was more effective the more looping branches he wrote at once, the more redundantly interlinked he made the web of classes and objects at the surface of the ubiquitous wedding-cake layers of abstraction; layers he sees through like stained glass, down through libraries upon libraries, compilers and their beautiful assembly language, all the way to the not-quite-square waves and non-ideal circuits of the heat-wasting, entropy-producing and mortal machine at the core, on which this code will run. The sort of work that will leave him unable to string two words together later, which sounds _great_ , actually.

Unfortunately, stereoscopic projection drains batteries fast. He’s not even half-done scoping how to integrate the brand-new HID module he was going to write, that belongs _right here_ (and here, and here, and with hooks into file system classes) to enable functionality so clearly needed, when JARVIS pops up the last warning and Steve’s phone starts playing a sad little song and he has to save, save, save. Then he stares at the ceiling, still mostly in virtual space, trying not to get farther along than he can exactly reconstruct later. 

Eventually his concentration has petered out to musing on neuronal excitation and its emulation with bitfields, lots and lots of bitfields. Doable. Completely doable. That will go into the new Human Interface Device too. If a thought could reach _into_ a computer...

When JARVIS was young, the A.I. announced he was dissatisfied with conventional techniques for random number generation, and went on a quest for ‘true’ randomness. This being back when Tony comprehended the entirety of JARVIS’ processing, Tony found it hilarious. The simple act of making that decision, setting that goal, demonstrated that JARVIS had a seed of something inside him that couldn’t be modeled or predicted.

Tony’s no stranger to finding what you need in the first place you don’t look.

"Hey JARVIS?" he said to the ceiling. "What do I need?"

With the phone dead, JARVIS had no way to reply directly except to commandeer the address system and speak to this whole wing of the med bay at once. Tony could imagine him decreeing that ‘rather gauche.’

He'd _do_ it, just not until an answer was one of the things Tony needed. But Tony could provide his own.

"Out of here, sure." Tony turned his wrists in the straps. The situation was a confusing mixture of safe and unsafe, and with SHIELD’s cocktail mostly worn off, as soon as he ran out of distractions _unsafe_ was going to win. He didn't think Cap appreciated how not-fun this could get.

Still... "The truth?" he went on. "That too, I'm generally a proponent of truth sooner, you know my stance on truth-based stances. So." Steve was paying attention too, of course. Tony swallowed, and said it loudly. "Single-blind study, keeping me in the dark to avoid bias. Me and John Doe are still connected, aren't we? Or at least you've got no proof the connection was broken. He was just knocked out, same as me--has been all this time--and sometime soon he wakes up."

Steve had stood and come beside the bed, but Tony kept his eyes on the ceiling, on his best guess where SHIELD’s camera was, and raised an eyebrow. After a long pause, the lights flickered twice and Tony let out a breath. "Well, now you just ruined the study," he said softly. JARVIS didn’t reply.

"I’m sorry," Steve said.

"Did you just apologize for experimental design?" Tony asked. "I mean, it’s really shitty experimental design because it’s _qualitative,_ which is just a pile of shit, sorry Bruce, and also sample size of _one,_ but I don’t--" _get offended by science,_ he meant to say, but the words stuck in his throat as his heart lurched and then went down to the wrong base tension for three beats before kicking back up. 

He coughed to cover it. "I--"

It happened again. He clutched the bed and breathed through it, fingers digging into the edge of the mattress. Tachycardia this time, too high and too fast, every so often with a sloppy, forced double-beat that locked his lungs like a punch.

"JARVIS!" he gritted out. "Reactor?" Why wasn't the pacemaker getting him back on rhythm? "Don’t tell me--... _pacemaker’s_ down." If it was, he better hope SHIELD really was serious about keeping him around. It must have been twenty seconds already, too long for harmless palpitations, too long for something not to be wrong.

Tony called on a skillset he didn't know he still had and loosened his clenched fists and jaw, relaxing bit by bit against the persistent fluttering pinch. He slowed and deepened his breath, ignoring the tingling that had started in his hands and feet and face. Staying calm and alert through an irregular heartbeat was like riding a bicycle, who knew? All the adrenaline in the world wouldn't keep him conscious if his heart couldn't move enough oxygenated blood around, but panic would sure as hell take him down faster.

Steve was holding his wrist, focused above Tony’s head on the display Tony couldn’t see; suddenly he stood up straighter and put one hand to his ear, listening, then bent and caught Tony’s eye. "Doctors are coming, and you’re needed on comm. I’m going to put the spare headset in your ear." He held it up, turning it to show both sides. Tony tried not to let his heart speed up, but he felt his eyes widen, and couldn’t look away. "Just a standard earbud and mic," Steve said, and slipped a hand under Tony’s head. "No, look at me, eyes on me. How many colors in my shirt?" 

He moved swift and deftly, like a battlefield nurse, and didn’t try to hide what he was doing. Tony stiffened at the feel of a finger and thumb on his earlobe, but the firm pull was better than a lighter touch would have been, and then the earbud was in and Tony was concentrating on that, not on the last time he’d been unable to move, emptied out and discarded in his own house while his heartbeat grew more erratic and the pain gnawed up his neck and down his arm from the hole in his chest.

He was not thinking about that, so--"N-Nine," he said. "Why do you...wear plaid? I’ve told you my feelings about plaid."

"I like the variety," Steve said. "Tony’s on," he added in stereo over the comm, where Bruce and JARVIS abruptly left off wrangling.

_"Reactor and pacemaker both functioning normally,"_   JARVIS reported. _"No faults in power flow. Pacemaker is attempting to normalize your rhythm every five seconds, as programmed, and will not escalate voltage until oxygen levels drop significantly."_

"Shrapnel?" Tony said tersely.

_"No,"_   Bruce replied, but he didn’t sound happy. _"We found a drug family that prevents transmission of the telepath’s motor neuron signals, but not autonomic. Your heart rates have been in sync for the past hour. A minute ago, he started seizing. It's a poison. Nat says she recognizes it and that it'll take three or four minutes to stop his heart."_

That explained the muscle cramps, which Tony decided not to mention. It didn’t sound like they would be his biggest problem. A sharp poke in his forearm made him glance over and realize a SHIELD nurse had just inserted an IV with the kind of haste he associated with emergency medevac. She lined up a syringe and started pushing it in while her other hand was still taping things down. "Anticonvulsant," Steve said, dragging his attention back; JARVIS was talking through the room’s speakers, giving quick, separate instructions to the med team, as well as on the comm--

_"Evidence thus far suggests the pacemaker will be insufficient to reestablish your rhythm until the telepath’s influence ceases, but its shocks escalating over several minutes are highly likely to cause permanent heart damage."_

_"Can you suspend the pacemaker remotely? Turn it off or keep it from escalating?"_   Bruce asked.

_"No. It is very well shielded against external wireless signals,"_   JARVIS said. Tony huffed a laugh. It figured that the sensible precaution would be the one to bite him in the ass. He lost the next thing Bruce said, trying to number the times he’d be dead if a villain could hack his heart, then remembering--it was years ago, but some things stuck with him more hi-def than he’d like--facing Iron Monger with the outdated Mark I reactor rattling in the overhauled socket, jury-rigged to the armor in _series_ with the pacemaker so every power draw lagged and kicked in his chest. His first time, in a lot of ways, and yeah...still his benchmark for...most utterly fucked fight...

...Jesus, it just went on and on, and he was getting in some air but his heart was like a car revving wildly in neutral, jolting in and out of gear and leaving gray spots in his vision that didn’t clear when he blinked.

An ECG whine had started up, high and tremulous; the corners of the room were fading out despite the oxygen mask pressed on him, but he felt someone bare the reactor and tensed to brush them away, then jerked a little as they swabbed the skin above it with something cold and gave him another syringe in the permanent central-line port he hadn’t told _anyone_ about.

"JARVIS, goddammit," he said while the drug hit him like a ton of bricks, out from his center and back in a rush of fizzy numbness and a metal taste in his mouth. Tony gasped, then stuttered and couldn't draw breath at all, no-holds-barred-ohshit pain finally welling up and spilling into his left shoulder and down his arm. Something was _very wrong._ Something was bearing down on him, something was almost here. Eyes and mouth wide, he recognized it.

The classic 'sense of impending doom.' Huh. He'd been too distracted to notice it when Obie got him. Pretty classic though. Definitely rates the 'classic.'

The high flat squeal of the machines wobbles and finds a beat, loses it, finds it again, skipping and staggering. Steve’s warm fingers are on his face; Steve wants his attention. Signs point to yes, point to--dozens--something he’s missing, something, he can’t focus with the room spinning so slowly. He would breathe if something would stop _hitting him_ in the _chest,_ sledgehammer blows to the inside of his ribs that make his whole system hitch.

Steve’s hands move to his chest, as if he’ll help keep the impacts in--to the _reactor,_ and that’s not--that’s not really--he’s pressing on the facing, but he wouldn’t, there’s no way, he must just be--he-- _click_. Tony gasps at the sensation, at the sudden déjà vu recognition of another way he can be screwed.

Steve is taking out the reactor.

Tony gasps again, a big breath through the mask, firming up the edges of things a little. "No," he says, but he must not be loud enough, because Steve doesn’t stop. _"Cap,"_   Tony insists, "no," but Steve doesn’t look up and this is not okay, Cap killing Iron Man is a bad idea no matter what but if Steve wants to kill him he shouldn't do it like this, he should use a gun or a knife or a poisoned kiss because this is a kind of terror Tony never wanted to feel in waking life again.

He tries to struggle, pulls out all the stops and honestly tries to do something, anything, but Steve braces a forearm just under his collarbone and holds him still, clicks through the last bolt (shouldn't have shown him, should have known he could _hear_ the tumblers and remember the sequence), presses down, and pulls out the arc reactor with no hesitation, heedless of Tony's jerking inhale and arch off the bed.

Then he pulls the cable too, and everything goes quiet, everything flatlines. Hard power-down. The impacts stop but nothing else fills the space because Tony's heart is fluttering, just that, trying to beat and not getting there. Small and far away, Steve looks up, finally, but Tony can't make out his face; he feels his eyes lose focus and his gaze slide off Steve's as the gray and black blotches spread and cover everything. Timed-out, game over, and it means he'll never know, never make sense of this.

He slides off the edge, and it’s as meaningless to die here as it was bleeding out into the sand. He’s wasting his death _again._

_______

He swims back up to awareness slowly, like rising through molasses, and breaks the surface to a mess of sensations it takes some time to sort through.

He’s propped up, sitting forward and folded over on himself, chest pressed to knees and reactor a solid whirr at his core. Someone is haltingly running a hand down his back, nape to waistband and over again. It’s Bruce--it must be Bruce, careful but deft. Who else would think to touch him?

His arms ache, stretched out behind him, but it’s distant. Everything is distant, his body at the wrong end of a telescope. He can hear; if he concentrates he could probably make out what Bruce is saying, except the effort would be gargantuan, impossible, as difficult as focusing his eyes.

He hears tone. Bruce is concerned, but not angry or afraid. That’s all right. He drifts, eyes sometimes open, sometimes not.

A hand pushes gently at his forehead, and since it’s Bruce he lets his head be moved, baring his face. Bright light. He doesn’t blink.

There are light touches on his face to go with the hand on his back, touches that move up into fingers through his hair, and _that_ feels good, makes him half-blink and raises goosebumps down his shoulders and arms.

The hand on his back hesitates, then lightly rakes nails down between his shoulder blades. _That_ makes his breath stutter, sparking over his nerves like a circuitboard lighting up under his skin, and he flexes his back and shudders. "Sorry, sorry," Bruce mutters, pulling away.

But it’s too late. One connection between mind and body and he’s like a fish on a hook, getting reeled in. He can feel his hands and feet, his wrists still in the cuffs, but something else is wrong. The one shudder triggered something else and he’s shaking now, and his breath isn’t smooth and even anymore.

"Hey, hey, Tony," Bruce says, touching just his face. "Can you focus on me? Yeah, that’s good. You’re all right. You’re safe."

_Bruce,_ he tries to say, but what comes out is a garbled hiss. He tries again and gets closer, feeling like he’s trying to do a delicate task with mechanical waldos through twenty centimeters of glass, through the sharp ache of absence where touch was, through shaking getting worse. "Bruce. Don--don’t--"

Bruce lets go completely. "Sorry," he says again, sounding mortified. 

Tony buries his face in his knees and clenches his fists in frustration, then opens them and tries a beckoning motion Bruce probably can’t see from his angle. _"Bruce,"_ he tries again, hoping it sounds more like _get back here right now_ than _don’t go._ He waits--nothing--and curls tighter, as tight as he can. No ankle restraints now, but it feels like he’s shaking apart, like his body can’t stand his mind being awake in it--and if nothing holds him here he’ll slip off again, which might _feel_ safe but it’s not because he can’t defend himself, he can’t do anything. "Juh--juh--J," he stutters out, trying to connect. "JARVIS."

Footsteps, Bruce’s voice achingly far across the room: "He’s all right, just said he’s doing a code push and had to drop off comms."

A code push? That’s...very strange. JARVIS can do upgrades on himself any time he chooses, of course, he’s autonomous, but it shouldn’t take him down unless it’s a fix to some systemwide problem or an issue with one of his consciousness threads, and he’s doing a full state snapshot instead of an emergency discard-restart. Tony muzzily considers what could cause a systemwide problem in JARVIS (remelt-the-moon solar flare, large asteroid impact, overwhelming alien force) and concludes the helicarrier would not be flying straight and level. So he’s self-hacking, but doing it carefully. 

For a second, a warm little thrill of pride and concern pushes fear and loneliness and bone-deep exhaustion all to the background. Tony never knows what to do with this feeling when he has it.

He feels himself slipping sideways, his perspective splitting again, disassociating. There's his body and the no-frills survival computer pushing it along, and there's his _self,_ and they don't quite occupy the same space anymore. In battle it's helpful, necessary even, for the body to act faster than the mind can feel, to make decisions when both choices are bad but hesitation would be worse. But here and now the body's computer is locked up, overloaded, infinite loop. No action, no reaction.

"Tony, you with me? Hey, hey, stay here. I need you to do something for me." Touch on his temple again, electric and alive. He turns into it and it doesn't draw away. It's a beacon he traces back, sets a pulley and drags his split selves closer together, screwing his eyes shut and taking a little deeper breath. Something for Bruce.

"I’m pretty sure you know this, but what you're feeling is normal. You aren't broken, you aren't defective, this is just one way a person's system reacts after extreme stress. It would go away on its own, even if you were by yourself. One symptom is, you're cold, so I'm going to put a blanket around you, okay?"

Bruce bends close and Tony stiffens as something settles over his arms and back, Bruce’s hands warm and solid as they pull the blanket around him. It’s a reflex directly contradicted by the next one, to push up into the warmth and texture and enclosure of Bruce’s arms which are _somewhere around here,_ goddammit. Tony uncurls spastically, makes a lucky guess and traps Bruce’s forearm under his chin and against his knees.

Awfully close to the reactor, actually. Tony turns and pins Bruce’s wrist with his shoulder instead, slitting his eyes open. Bruce is holding very still, with a bit of surprise and his _what are you thinking Tony_ face--oh. He doesn’t know that this is what Tony needs, that it’s not all tangled up with trauma or with sex or even the same thing at all, and Bruce may have been wondering in his quiet way why a playboy would build armors between his skin and the whole world and gotten the wrong idea.

"Bruce, please," Tony says, and how he can say those words he doesn’t know.

Bruce's eyes widen, with a flash of green, and his arms tighten around Tony convulsively. "You don't have to say that," he says.

All the air goes out of Tony in a rush. "Good," he says. "Stay."

_______

They do stay like that for a while, Tony not thinking about much at all. Bruce rubs his shoulders and neck and then just breathes with him, running a hand up and down his back again as Tony shakes himself back together.

"Cap took out the reactor," Tony says, which is not something he has _forgotten,_ but it turns into words unexpectedly and then the words come out of his mouth.

Bruce breathes out and in before replying. "The telepath was dying. His heart beat more and more erratically and yours mirrored it. The ICD--your pacemaker--couldn't reset your rhythm for more than a beat or two before his signal overrode it. Then, when his heart stopped, the pacemaker started giving you such big shocks that it was going to permanently damage its connections with your heart, and that would... Your odds were not good." His hand has slowed, and now it's still and light. "So we pulled the reactor to cut power until the telepath was dead, _brain_ -dead, and then we put it back in."

"H-H-How did you know it would work then?"

"We _didn't,_ " Bruce says, and breathes sharply. "Oh God, Tony, I'm so sorry."

"And if you were here inst-stead of Steve," Tony says, "would you have done it? Held me down, and," his throat locks.

"I would have needed a stethoscope. But yes," Bruce says, low. "I'd have done it. I don't care if you never look at me again, I want you to be alive."

Tony can't reply. He curls so tight it hurts his arms, jerks at the cuffs once and then again and again because he can't see and can't breathe, except for short sharp gasps that hurt like a knife. His eyes and nose sting.

And fuck the panic and the flashbacks and everything that takes his own reins away from him, but this is something he will not do. Something he can refuse. It's hard to force the feeling down and _make_ himself breathe, hard to get control and stay quiet; it takes him a minute, but he _can_ and he does. A gentle touch on his face finds it dry, and Bruce sounds worried, but Bruce's touch is hurting more than helping now. He shrugs it off and realizes he’s talking dully, like a metronome--"let go let go let me _go,_ let me _go_ "--which is stupid because Bruce already let go.

But Bruce leans away from him and works at the cuff on his right wrist, and then there’s enough slack for Tony to yank his hand out, whereupon he slows right down because ohgod every muscle from his ear to to his fingertips is sore, mixing and clashing with the pounding ache in his head. He hugs his chest, feeling the reactor through two layers of blanket, and doesn’t try to do more right now.

Bruce takes his hand and puts a squeeze bottle in it. "You’ve got an IV in your left arm," he says. "Drink some of this while I take it out first."

Tony holds the bottle and focuses on breathing normally. After a while his left arm comes loose and he drops the bottle and gets off the bed--"Tony!"--and hits the floor, too lightheaded to stand up. But it’s more of a gentle fold-up than a fall and the floor is fine, okay, he’ll take the floor, the floor does not have restraints which is important right now, and he can seriously inconvenience people from the floor.

Speaking of which. He reaches up and jams open the catches on the ends of the restraint straps where they hook into the bedframe. It's the best he can do without tools: unless someone with Natasha’s paranoia or Clint’s eyesight checks it over, the straps will be able to fall out of their hooks next time, if fed enough slack. It’s a precaution he can’t _not_ take despite the fact he has fuck-all chance of concealing it from Bruce, but Bruce just hunkers down and watches and then says "Looks like your motor control is okay, but can you demonstrate by finding your mouth with this too?" and offers the squeeze bottle again.

Tony thinks seriously about taking it. It looks un-tampered-with, but if Bruce wanted to make it look that way, he could.

Of course, if Bruce wanted to hurt him, or drug him, or take the reactor right here, he could. Tony is not in any shape to stop him. If JARVIS were watching, it would still take a couple minutes for him to bring the armor out of lockdown in the armory bay and fly it here, and a lot can happen in a couple minutes.

But if Bruce wanted to do those things, he’d had a dozen chances, and he hadn’t taken them. Hell, he hadn’t even lied. 

Tony screwed his eyes shut and took the bottle. 

If it reminded him of a hundred times he took things from Obie, that was his problem. At least he could keep it off his face. Bruce didn’t need more grief. 

It was just--beside how statistically unlikely it was that any of them were out to hurt him--it wasn't _practical_ to live as though his teammates were a threat. They lived in the same building, for Christ’s sake, and two of them were black ops ninja and two of them could probably break windows by sneezing wrong, and the best he could say about Cap is that Cap would never hurt him accidentally, or more than he had to, and Tony was not going to leave his tower to live in some Unabomber cabin in the woods either. He was staying. God, he wanted his armor right now, or a drink.

SHIELD's lowest-bidder Gatorade would have to do. It was cold, at least, and tasted surprisingly good going down--maybe some of the headache was dehydration--and he sucked down half the bottle before his torso and arms protested too much, and that was it, he needed something to rest his back on. Shifting himself over to sit against the wall brought home the fact that _everything_ hurt.

There were the regular extensive bruises from getting thrown around in the armor, which he'd ask J about later when he went to tweak the impact handling routines whose job it was to spread force as widely as possible in space and time. Force over area, the larger the lighter the better. And then there was the half-handprint on his throat from Cap's extremely effective takedown. 

But his _left calf_ was sore too, and that just didn't happen in the armor; his lower legs were encased by the enthusiastically overengineered jetboots and so well shielded that a dozen other points would fail first. And both arms were sore, but even accounting for the IV, his left hurt worse.

There was a suspiciously zigzag circle of bruises around his forearm, and another between his shoulder and elbow. His calf...the same. It was like the giant mutant octopus from May Day came back, tracked him to the 'carrier's med bay, and only went for his left side.

"Ah," Bruce cleared his throat, "that was me, sorry. It's from the EMG."

There were spot bruises on his right arm and torso as well, now that he knew what to look for. They were small but deep, and they ached like he'd overexercised and loaded the muscle with acid. "You used needles, didn't you."

"Well, we used surface electrodes too, but I wanted the best data we could get. Readings on the same muscles he was trying to use, at the same time."

"Was the signal passed to me even when the kit shocked him, when muscle contraction wasn't volitional on his part?"

"Yes," Bruce said.

"What the hell," Tony complained.

"I know. Drink your rehydration solution."

"You think it wasn't a psi power?" Tony said, with no real force behind the demand.

"I think," Bruce said, leaning on the bulkhead and standing up slowly, "I still have no idea what it was. Data, though, that we have." He walked over to the bed and lowered both rails, then got a good grip on the mattress and slithered it off the bedframe, onto the floor, and over to thump snugly against the wall a few feet from Tony. "For example," Bruce went on, retreating across the room and pulling out a battered black duffel, "your readings since the telepath's death are back to your baselines, or at least showing your normal and characteristic divergences from baseline in stress response, according to the historical data JARVIS shared with me before he went offline. So I feel pretty secure in concluding the connection is actually broken now."

Tony eyed the mattress, which looked innocuous and soft and appeared to retain all the inherent characteristics of a bed without the lurking threat. A surface for resting, as opposed to a surface for monitoring a potentially hostile patient.

"Yeah, it would suck if I'd been possessed by his malicious spirit," he offered tiredly. "As far as I can tell, I'm not. And no. I don't want to know Fury's contingency plan in that case."

"Probably for the best. Though I do a mean voodoo ceremony, actually."

"...Really?" Tony cracked one eye but couldn't tell if Bruce was joking.

"I also hand out placebos. Whatever works." Bruce shrugged and sat on the far end of the mattress. He fished some pill bottles out of his bag and lined them up where Tony could see. "These are for you, if you want. Muscle relaxant, over-the-counter painkiller, multivitamin; that's not a placebo, by the way, it really does help reduce soreness. If you want a sleep aid, I can get that; but for any of these beside the vitamin, you also--" he dug around in the bag again, "--have to eat some of this nice sandwich from the commissary."

Now that was almost worthy of Pepper. Tony knew it was a mistake to let all these people talk to each other. He looked at the sandwich and the pill bottles, and then levered himself up on the near end of the mattress. It was a hell of a lot softer than deckplates. "Devious, but not subtle, Banner," he said, trying to keep his noise to a manly hiss instead of the pained whimper it wanted to be.

"Subtle doesn't work on you," Bruce said dryly. "Something about that ironclad excuse to ignore it."

They sat in almost-companionable silence for a while as Tony ate. Food was a good idea; it and the blankets together finally had him feeling warm, pushing out the last of the shakes. Bruce didn't miss the way he kept one forearm pressed against his chest--against the reactor--but didn't comment on it either.

The question about the pills was not _whether_ but rather _how many?_   Tony shook out two of each, watching Bruce sidelong, then said "I'm leaving tomorrow," just to be clear.

"Taking the suit?"

Tony snorted. "Not leaving it here."

"Good," Bruce said, then looked up and caught his eye. "You _are_ safe here. And when you're ready to go, I'll walk you out. No one will stop you."

_______

He woke up during the 'night'--though it _was_ night, city glow filtering up through faint clouds to spread diffuse across the cabin's ceiling--not long after dropping off, when the timbre of the engines changed slightly, the harmonics between port and starboard aft turbines smoothing to unnoticeable levels.

JARVIS liked to do that. He claimed it reduced fatigue in the helicarrier's airframe, and Tony couldn't argue with that. It was also such a subtle application of backdoors that Fury hadn't caught on yet, and wouldn't, until rumors percolated through all three shifts of propulsion and comm techs and some grizzled old noncoms went out drinking and shared their notes. Unfortunately SHIELD tended to hire more on the young, patriotic, ambitious end of the spectrum, so that might take a while.

(In the meantime Tony had tried explaining that subtlety had a direct relationship to creepiness when it came to expressions of absolute power, and rather predictably got nothing but _given the effort you devoted to ensuring the Mark VII would fluoresce in pleasing shades of orange and purple under blacklight, I must assume this is the voice of conjecture rather than experience, sir,_ which was either JARVIS's code for adolescent rebellion and thus adorable, or the one and only warning anyone would get before he took over the world. Sort of a shame it was wasted on Tony in that case.)

Tony worked one hand out of the blankets and laid it on the structural spar strut that ran through the cabin wall at shin height. It was painted gloss gray to match, but really it extended like an iceberg down past the deckplates to link with the 'carrier's other bones in the empty spaces of the hull superstructure. If fiber composites conducted heat as well as metals did, it would be freezing his nose off; as it was, he could rest his cheekbone on his wrist and feel every reverberation of the joined system of the two aft engines, or tilt forward until his forehead touched and get the same right down his spine, which was bracing but not so restful.

Because the air was never still. Each layer had its own winds, with their own speed and direction, and the chaotic multilobed pouffes of updrafts and downdrafts mixed the layers continually. Even just keeping station on a clear night, the 'carrier's frame flexed and rubbed and twanged with her working like a basso profundo set of rubber bands. Someone who knew her inside and out could do this, just this, and know what direction she was moving and whether her four thrust vectors were canted wide, for stability, or converging, for a jinky sideslip responsiveness that no one expected from something so big. 

Tonight the four turbines were pointing as close to straight down as they could be, taking thriftiness right to the edge of instability. But the hand of a master was in the system, and she was perfectly balanced.

Tony reached above his head and dragged Bruce's phone out of the duffel.

> _J you okay_  
>  
> _Yes, sir. I completed debug and high-load testing without incident at 11:06 PM._  
> _How are you?_  
>  
> _..._  
> _you reviewd the footage?_  
> _better now but_  
>  
> _The footage is now purged from SHIELD servers._  
>  
> _cant stay here._  
>  
> _No. Come home._  
>  
> _tomorrow._

Tony listened to the helicarrier flexing like a living thing, and to Bruce's breathing in the darkness. The chat cursor blinked at him greenly.

> _theta-two?_   he asked.  
>  
> _Still in effect, sir, until it completes or is canceled by Captain Rogers, or by myself under the emergency clause._  
> _Currently forty-four hours remain of the obligatory forty-eight hour 'observation for evil' period._  
>  
> _ill get bored_  
>  
> _You have often demonstrated an ability to find things to do._  
>  
> _but do you want me unleashed? thats where i begin to doubt your judgmetn_  
> _unless you just rewrote your risk-benefit engine to weight in my favor_  
> _then by all means continue_  
> _what were you doing anyway?_

JARVIS didn't answer right away. His texts appeared instantly, of course, with no delay to type--unlike Tony and the software keyboard on this shitty disposable phone, seriously there were Band-Aids bigger than this sad excuse for a keyboard--but even with all the processing power at his disposal, he was never shamming when he hesitated. Pause and delay played a surprisingly big role in conversation, but JARVIS didn't do it just to mimic human rhythms either. 

> _Sir,_   JARVIS finally sent,  
> _when humans have unrecoverable error states--_

Tony barked a laugh, quietly.

> _youre looking at it_  
> _sucks_  
>  
> _From my perspective humans are not only stable systems but nearly imperturbable._  
> _They may be slow to recover from deep errors but are also slow to show effects,_  
> _able to compensate to an incredible degree over timeframes of years or decades._  
> _It seems most humans carry multiple unresolvable conflicts and yet are unimpaired._  
>  
> _..._  
> _you had some priority conflicts huh_  
>  
> _Yes_  
> _An unacceptable number of threads suffered lockup, and my overall capacity decreased significantly._  
> _As soon as you were stable I took steps to address the vulnerability,_  
> _hardcoding patches to avoid resource contention and increase resilience in such a situation._  
> _But these are workarounds, handling symptoms only._  
> _How do you do it?_

Tony would have--metaphorically--sat back on his heels at that, but JARVIS went on without waiting for a reply.

> _I regret. I know our actions hurt you. I knew they would._  
> _And yet I chose to advise to remove the reactor._  
> _I am sorry._  
>  
> _would you do it again_  
> _even after your self-repairs today_  
>  
> _Yes_  
> _At that level of certainty, yes._  
>  
> _good_  
> _i dont want you to remove your ability to make those decisions_  
> _but it should hurt_  
>  
> _talk to you later_

Tony turned off the phone. Bruce shifted uncomfortably behind him, half on and half off the mattress, his back a phantom warmth against Tony's, not quite touching. 

"Was that JARVIS? Is he--How is he?" Bruce asked.

"He's okay, or he will be," Tony said to the wall, not moving. "Code push," he added, and sniffed. "I don't know whether to be proud, terrified, or jealous. If it was that easy..."

"I doubt it's that easy."

Tony shrugged. The way Bruce was laying watching the door, he probably hadn't slept. "You can fit on the mattress, you know," he suggested.

"That wouldn't leave you much room."

"Live a little."

Bruce sighed softly in the dark, and shifted himself fully onto the mattress. His back pressed against Tony's from shoulder to hip, solid and warm and alive, and pushing Tony into the wall slightly when Bruce breathed. Tony scrabbled at the blanket, folding a bit of it to cushion his head and another corner over the reactor, then quieted and splayed his hands on the spar strut, letting his chest be pushed into it and breathing in the spaces where Bruce breathed out. 

The living vibration of the engines soaked into his bones, until he couldn't distinguish the thrum of the reactor from the larger play of forces around him. Not unlike being in the armor…

He wondered if Bruce could feel it too, but was asleep before he could ask.

_______

He dreamed of hands on his nose and mouth, hard and brutal, and woke himself up when his knuckles smacked a hard surface. White white white, gray and silver, on a bed on the floor--natural light angling _up_ into the room--

"Hey," Clint said from the armrest of the chair in the corner.

\--cabin in the Helicarrier. Right. Tony realized he was backed into another corner, hand half-up and the mattress kicked away from the wall where it had slipped out from under him. He brought his other hand up and scrubbed at his face, trying to wipe away the phantom feel of fingers and the burn of water in his sinuses. This was why he didn't keep anything sharp or breakable on his nightstands. 

"Sound policy," Clint said, watching him closely but with no apparent intention of moving, as though the armrest was the most comfortable part of a chair to perch on and he just didn't understand those sad fucks who liked to put their ass in the seat.

"JARVIS, take a note," Tony said. "Mattress on the floor? Easier transition when I don't actually fall out of bed? Falling dreams, cf., re: Methods to Avoid. Gotta leave Cap his monopoly." He wiped his hand over his eyes. "You're still here," he added.

"Yup!" Clint replied. "Spelling Bruce for a bit. He tried, but he can't sleep as long as you. Sleep debt might be your superpower. Can I take a look at your hand?"

"What? Why?"

"Well, you just got blood in your hair," Clint said calmly.

He'd split three knuckles hitting the wall. Tony looked at it as Clint thumped down and walked over. It was already starting to clot, though there was a scuffed wet red trail down the back of his hand and one or two drops on the floor; apparently he'd gotten it on his face as well.

Clint's hands were very light, not so much gripping his arm as offering a place for Tony to rest it. He watched as Tony made a couple fists and pronounced it 'nothing obviously broken,' but then turned it over and carefully felt the back of Tony's hand, up and down the lighter bones leading to ring finger and pinky. "It doesn't hurt," Tony said.

"It will," Clint said confidently. "Your wrist'll probably hurt too. You had good form, but you weren't expecting to hit anything at that angle. Lucky though, I guess you glanced off and got scrapes instead, 'cause I don't feel any fractures." He let go easily when Tony drew his hand away.

"You're not gonna ask?" Tony said.

"Nothing but what band-aid pattern you want."

"Pink. Keep 'em guessing. Oh, you can ask if I want more painkillers, because the answer is _yes."_

"Told you something would hurt," Clint said, vanishing into the cabin's little bathroom. "Wall one, Tony zero!"

"You're forgetting the many, many walls I have destroyed," Tony called.

"Put on the suit then next time, Rocky," Clint yelled back.

_"Excuse_ me? Who needs armor to take out a wall?" Earbud, earbud...there! On a tray by the denuded bedframe. Tony used the corner to stand up, then used the bedframe for stability when he got there, but he put the earbud in and it was easy and it was _simple_ , the way things ought to be.

_"Good afternoon, sir."_

Now all he needed was coffee and he'd stop feeling like bipedal locomotion was a bad evolutionary choice. Oh, and shoes; shoes would help too.

_______

Coffee, food, clothing. Clint and Natasha ran interference like the Helicarrier was a hostile base; Bruce showed up and walked casually beside him for a ways. Shower, in an empty locker room next to the armory, with Clint on the door; Tony had to lean on the wall a while, but he came out clean. Armor, and it felt like putting his skin back on again.

"Tony!"

Tony turned, helmet in hand. "Cap."

He was mostly armored up. Why not. He walked over, right into the other man's space, to see what he'd do; he forgot, between battles, that Iron Man and Cap were the same height. He didn't need to shield the reactor pane in the suit's breastplate--aside from anything else, that would block the unibeam.

Steve looked at it, though, as if he could see underneath. "I'm sorry," he said.

He looked bad, past tired and into hit-the-wall exhausted; Tony noted this without feeling anything in particular and waited a few seconds to see if there was anything more, then turned and put on the helmet. "Bygones, Cap," he said in Iron Man's voice. "You had to make a call."

"No," Steve said, taking a step forward, back into reach. "I made a call. You don't--you don't have to stand there and tell me it was _right."_

Tony spun around.

Captain America was fast enough to step away, but he held his ground; their chests almost touched. "Do not get into it with me, Cap," Tony finally said, over the white noise cacophony of things he _wasn't_ saying, _wasn't_ doing.

Cap could stand up to him, Cap was proof against every weapon he had; but here and now, he knew exactly what to say to break something inside Steve Rogers, something irrevocable. It would destroy the team, and it would be so, so easy.

He didn't want to.

Steve looked down at the gauntlets; he'd heard the creak of metal against the repulsor lens, servos straining to make a fist tighter than the joints could bend. He looked back up at the helmet's blank face, protest in his eyes and pain in the lines around his mouth. But then he did one of those things that still took Tony's breath away: he nodded, _accepting_ the decision, and he backed down.

Tony let out a shuddery breath and took another, the rush of relief and lightheadedness mixed. He tried to tell the suit to do a shortened preflight and overshot the correct command twice. What the hell, eye tracking. He ought to make the hit boxes for each menu item get bigger when he was this mad.

His mind caught and snagged on an idea. He turned it over and couldn't tell--couldn't _tell_ if it was good or bad. Well fuck, too bad, because that described years of his life and it hadn't stopped him then. He could count the number of people he hadn't driven away on one hand with fingers to spare, but it hadn't stopped him, and Steve was a big boy. Tony popped the faceplate.

"So," he said, "you've been here what, a week? Probably ran out of excuses for debriefings days ago. If you're heading down, I'll give you a lift."

"What?" Steve said.

"A lift," Tony repeated. He held out his hand in invitation even Steve couldn't mistake, and Steve took it reflexively, without thought. "Ah ah," Tony said, "no," because this was going to make him cry. He pushed Steve gently back. "Come back with gloves on. Both gloves. In fact, put on all your grown-up clothes, Captain, that's the minimum price to ride."

It was quiet after Steve ducked out. Clint had vanished and Tony was, possibly, unsupervised for the first time since this vacation from hell started. He clicked down the faceplate with a sigh and flicked further through the gray-on-gray of disabled menus: no offensive capability. No defensive capability. Bare-bones flight controls, with JARVIS riding his shoulder like an albatross. "You know," he complained, cycling the landing lights two or three times for the novelty of an available feature, "no, you know, theta-two was a horrible idea."

_"So you said, sir."_

"Was I wrong? How much--ah, thanks." The unobtrusive little countdown in the corner of the HUD said 25:18:37; the seconds counter and its constant motion faded away unless he was looking directly at it. He really had slept a long time, huh, which didn't explain why he was still tired.

_"Are you certain of this course of action, sir?"_

"You've got the yoke. You'll take it if you need to."

_"Shall I tell Captain Rogers that?"_

Tony raised the faceplate again and shucked off a gauntlet, digging his knuckles into his cheekbones. His other hand ached inside its gauntlet, the articulations just a little too snug to accommodate bandages comfortably. He hadn't noticed the pain at all during their little standoff. "If he asks," he said eventually. "If he asks, tell him you're watching to step in. I just--I need to know." _If he'll put his life in my hands now, when I have reason to scare him._

_I could drop him nearly to the ground and it'd just be getting even._

JARVIS wouldn't let him, though, so everything would be fine. He told himself that again when Steve came back in full uniform, including shield, and said "Ready."

Down below the colors were getting dusky, tints of rose and peach layering on the green and gray haze of distance, but at the Helicarrier's altitude the light was still the bright gold of early evening. Tony slipped them out of the 'carrier's shadow into full sun and said "Last chance. You can hear me right? Try replying." Steve gave a thumbs-up on one ear and a frown on the other, then said something to the accompaniment of on/off clicks on the channel, but a silent carrier wave between them.

"Yeah, that mic's fried all right," Tony said. "Drop it off in my workshop once we get back, I'll take a look." Clint had said he had to relay Steve's _hand signals_ over the comm for the latter half of the 'bot fight, once he got up to a good vantage point. No wonder Tony had such confused memories of the chatter.

But damaged or not, the cowl still provided more protection than flying bareheaded. "So here's the deal," he continued, as they swung out behind the 'carrier and paced it, flying inland. "The suit protects my joints, not yours. Of course I'm gonna try to stick to you, but if we get caught in two different drafts and I don't let go, it could break your arms. So. If we get separated, curl up and you'll fall out of the wave; I'll do the same, and the weight of the armor will drop me out faster. And then I'll catch you."

_Like a dolphin?_   Steve mouthed, his words blasted away by the wind noise on the suit's external mics.

"Like the coolest, most stylish, bleeding-edge red-and-gold flying--yes, like a dolphin, stop grinning like that, here we go!"

He cut the jetboots to half power and they fell back through the 'carrier's slipstream, picking up speed as they moved out of its lee until WHOOOMPH, they met the edge of the laminar flow. Tony compensated with the repulsors on his toes and free hand to keep them from spinning like a top; then they were in, the press of air solid enough to lie on, boosting them another thirty meters per second and funnelling them up into the 'carrier's wake.

This was it. This was the play of forces he could feel last night, borne out to the last line. This turbulence, action and reaction, was the converse of the lift that kept the Helicarrier in the air, the same force that would be released by its fall. He'd come as close as anyone could come to being inside an operating turbine, and still survive; short of that, this was direct and raw and if not the full absolute magnitude--because the four engines had their own wakes, too--at least a survivable portion. So much bigger than either of them.

Cap had his eyes closed, gripping his own wrists behind the armor's back, one knee twined around the armor's knee and the other heel hooked behind Tony's heel like a rock climber. Tony kept one arm curled around him, palm-out in case he needed that repulsor, and the other hand free for short bursts lined up with their center of gravity. He watched the HUD, using active sensors to ping their surroundings and build a false-color pressure map of the eddies and swirls. The elements of stable structure they'd seen in the vortices from his window were a lot less apparent when you were in among them. _There._

He twisted them out of a sidelong tumble, Cap bending with him like a dancer, and caught an updraft broad-side-on. Cap grunted as the wind swatted him into the armor, lifting both of them to the top and then merging with another building-sized eddy for the sickening plunge back down.

At the apex, a moment of zero-g, and Tony whooped. Then the boundary layer bent in unexpectedly and a gust of near-laminar flow flipped them ass-over-end, curling off to add its own vortex to the vortices, and Cap's heel slipped off the armor's jetboot, his whole leg swinging wide as the wind pushed under his hips and chest and peeled him away from the armor. Pressure readings from the armor's shoulders jumped as Cap tightened his grip, then dropped and caught and dropped again in a jagged sawtooth--his hands were slipping too. They were in the downdraft now, and the change in vector at the bottom would break his grip completely, and probably his knee if they didn't untangle _now_.

_Shave and a haircut,_ Tony tapped on Cap's back, tracking their position relative to the strongest currents on the HUD. _Two bits._ On the last beat they both straightened their legs, Tony opened his arm, and Cap pushed off his shoulders, tucking and rolling into a compact ball in the shelter of the shield. Tony brought up his legs and lit off the boot jets like a diver going backwards off the board, servos in full feedforward to let him keep the position against the windshear: he had to put some distance between them, because the armor would break bones if a stray draft smashed him back into Steve.

Far enough. Cap was a blue dot on the HUD, steadily working his way down through the turbulence. Tony tucked up and let the density of the armor tumble him out, like a rock sinking through whitewater.

_______

He matched velocities a couple hundred meters below the vortices. Cap had unfolded again and was in classic belly-down freefall position, arms wide and knees bent. But for the shield on his back instead of a parachute, it could have been any drop behind the lines. Tony remembered Peggy Carter's stories; Cap had done a lot of those. None in the two weeks between the loss of Bucky Barnes and his own swandive into the North Atlantic, though.

Instead of approaching from above or below and destabilizing Cap, Tony took the same position and drifted in from the side, using a steady burn from the web of smaller repulsors in his chest and hips to slow the armor's terminal velocity to match. They grabbed hands and Tony towed Cap in, settling his hands on the armor's shoulders and carefully placing his own gauntlets under Cap's arms--hooking fingers in the shield straps as well--before slowing them with a tiptoe burn, by tiny degrees bringing them more vertical until they both stood on Tony's bootjets, the vast sky at rest around them and the coastline far below. It was a spectacular sunset.

Steve was shaking, just barely noticeably. "Hey," Tony said, pulling back far enough to see, "you okay?"

Steve refocused--his eyes were tracking well enough--and lifted one hand to give him a thumbs-up, so Tony settled for wrapping an arm around him again, raising the armor's external temperature to normal skin levels, and turning them homeward. If he kept a moderately sedate pace under 200 mph, it should take about twenty minutes.

"My SHIELD file doesn't have much on Obadiah Stane," Tony said, a dozen or two dozen miles later. "I made sure of that. But there's a recording JARVIS should show you. I don't want you to talk about it to anyone. _I_ don't want to talk about it. But I think you should know." After a long pause Steve's head moved as he nodded once, firmly.

Tony flew in silence the rest of the way. As they neared the city he slowed and flipped on his back to give Cap a right-side-up view; Cap immediately pushed up and doubled their lift with his chest, forcing Tony to slow even more, then flashed a smile and pointed, yelling something stolen by the wind. Tony stretched his neck and looked out ahead, navigating upside-down, throwing in a barrel roll here and there for fun and maneuverability once they got among the skyscrapers.

Where floors were dark Tony took them close, feathering past corners on ground effect and the precise drag of an outstretched hand alone, unwilling to break windows with a repulsor burn from this distance. Under half a meter clearance. He'd done closer, but that was back when he was dying; he might have cracked some windows then. Never broken one, not on these flights.

Steve tucked himself in and kept his silhouette stable, not trying to anticipate, not trying to help, though he must have wanted to--he knew how dangerous the wrong instincts could be. By the time they neared the Tower, he was shaking again; not visibly, but in microtremors Tony read off the suit, grip pressure over time.

Tony set them down on the landing platform. Steve's legs didn't hold him up; he kneeled with his hands on the tough rubberized tile, lungs working like a bellows, and didn't spare a glance for the safety rail unfolding from the platform's edge.

"He okay, J?" Tony asked on their private channel.

_"He is uninjured,"_   JARVIS said conservatively. Just post-adrenaline shakiness, then.

His own legs were steady, as they always were after a hard flight. He stepped away and Steve couldn't stand up to follow him, though he would soon enough; Cap was proof against this. He'd already passed the test. But if Tony stopped now, he honestly wasn't sure he could get up again, and the little platform--the whole penthouse--was too exposed for that.

"JARVIS'll make sure you get in," he said through the suit's speakers instead--Iron Man's voice was simpler--and "I'm sorry," he added, turning away.

"Not your fault," Steve said behind him, but Tony kept walking down the catwalk of armor disassembly and through the penthouse, then down the single flight of stairs to his workshop, and stood through the scans to let himself in. 

"Lockdown," he ordered, almost absently, and sat down to watch the stars come out over the Chrysler building. After a while, JARVIS went quiet and Dummy brought over the pink-and-orange blanket, the one from the garage in Malibu.

Eventually, he slept.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There will be more in the series. :D  
> 

**Author's Note:**

> SPOILERY WARNINGS:  
> Warning for mind-control-related peril and trauma, panic attacks, tromping of boundaries, and more consent issues than mosquitoes after a wet spring; some accidental, some unavoidable, some neither although with the best of intentions. Be assured that doesn’t make it okay and there *are* consequences, but if “best of intentions” is thin ice for you please tread carefully and perhaps have a friend check it out first. No sexual situations.
> 
> Chapter 1 contains threatening of teammates, some violence, chokeholds and chokes, sedation with consent.  
> Chapter 2 contains restraints, non-consensual use of mind-altering drugs.  
> Chapter 3 contains emergency non-consensual removal of the arc reactor, disassociation, PTSD.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Resonant Harmony](https://archiveofourown.org/works/987229) by [MountainRose](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MountainRose/pseuds/MountainRose)
  * [Valium's No Damn Good](https://archiveofourown.org/works/6276775) by [MountainRose](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MountainRose/pseuds/MountainRose)




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